


coincidence makes sense only with you

by treble



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post Episode: s04e13 Journey's End
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-02
Updated: 2013-05-02
Packaged: 2017-12-10 04:01:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/781524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/treble/pseuds/treble
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of the year Rose spent crossing universes. Post Journey's End. Not quite a fix-it, but something like.. I'm archiving all my old fic from LJ. </p><p>  <i>She sees the universes where they have succeeded, the ones where she almost can’t squeeze out because the cracks are beginning to settle, to seal....But she also sees the universes where they have failed, the silent ones where she can barely seep in before she can feel herself in danger of flickering out. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	coincidence makes sense only with you

**Author's Note:**

> JE compliant, and all that entails. Nothing is mine. This is very un-beta'd. My apologies.

***

  
Rose Tyler knows, all along.

Because she spends almost a year being pulled across universes, trying to find the one that fits.

And so she sees it all.

The year that never was, was to her. The first time, she wanders for a bit, tracing out the sidelines of the story with her feet, knowing it isn’t hers to follow. But she watches closely, because after the second time she gets pulled there, onto the Valiant, she suspects it's something she needs to see.

She can feel him so close that her head starts to ache, starts to burn. But when she slips around the corner she finds Jack instead. He's bleeding on the floor and when he looks up at her his eyes are too hazy with pain for any recognition to seep through.

“You’re alive?” She breathes out quietly, kneeling down to kiss him on the cheek, cradling his face in her hands.

“You aren’t here,” He responds, squeezing his eyes shut. When he opens them again, she isn’t.

She still has a little of his blood on her hands when she finishes fading into the next universe.

She sees the universes where they have succeeded, the ones where she almost can’t squeeze out because the cracks are beginning to settle, to seal.

She doesn’t know how they save the stars, only sees that they might, that they could. She likes knowing that there are worlds where they prevail, and she figures her life can serve as the encyclopedia to it all, someday.

Yet she also sees the universes where they have failed, the silent ones where she can barely slip in before she can feel herself in danger of flickering out.

She cannot jump far enough forward in the future of those worlds to be sure, but that's enough to know that she walks among ghosts who are fated to be failed.

Somewhere along the way she gives up keeping notes on universes and timelines, because she finds she just remembers it all anyway.

She often ends up in what she calls her past, though it all feels like her past soon enough. She keeps as a companion her déjà vu. She sees the Sycorax invasion three times, the Autons twice, and the attack of the Sontarans four times.  But it is the Racnoss that she sees the most.

She has to watch him die six times in the water under the Thames and there are no times that she can stop him, in these wrong universes, wrong times. And she keeps getting pulled there and she keeps showing up to watch, praying it will be a time that he lives. It is the third time that she realizes for him, this is right after their goodbye. It makes her giddy and drunk and she is muffling tears into the sleeve of her leather jacket, trying to remember the feel of his fingertips, and then getting sick on the side of the concrete platform where she is hidden.

No one hears her.

She wastes the entirety of her next shift in a new universe lost in a bar in a world with an affinity for a drink that is reminiscent of a coconut flavored tequila. She cannot shed a tear and doesn’t say a word. 

She falls a little in love with Donna every time she is there to stop him. The other times she is left alone to swim.

She sees Donna once in the year that never was. She speaks with a loud clear voice and is brave and strong and fantastic. She makes Rose smile.

Towards the end, she starts seeing a Donna in almost every universe. Some Donnas don’t know her yet, some never will. But the worst is a series of days in which Rose almost runs into a series of Donnas from the near (right) future who laugh too loudly with smiles that don’t quite fit. They all look right through her. It seems the timelines are converging on Donna, and Donna must diverge in turn.

She starts to suspect that she is the messenger that must show Donna how to be the key and it twinges, makes her feel tired and undervalued, a great waste of energy to play a supporting role.

The bitterness makes her feel human for the first time in a couple jumps and she holds onto it, revels in it. And then she ends up watching Donna save him from drowning again and she vows to be anything for this woman, if she never has to watch him give in like that again.

Still, she wants even more to be the one there the next time, the one to keep him from falling, to always keep him from falling.

It's only four jumps later that she ends up in Donna’s World, and Rose has to tell her she is going to die. She tastes the weight of the words as she says it and realizes the extent of their truth. Causal nexus be damned if she doesn’t try to get it through to Donna as best she can. But she suspects Donna doesn’t truly understand, and won’t remember anyway, knows that she can't. She doesn’t even understand herself. As she kneels in the street, watching Donna’s eyes flutter shut, Rose realizes she had already started to mourn her, several jumps back.

***

It's one month short of a year when she's pulled to Bad Wolf Bay. She knows where she is before she has fully actualized, remembers the air. She is frowning as she spins around, quickly pulling out her cell phone, desperate to be somewhere else. Until she hears the all too familiar sound of the TARDIS. She scans quickly but can see no one on the beach. She fumbles through the dunes; alternately hiding from and seeking out a glimpse of what might be in her own future.

She slips in her panic and stumbles, landing hard on her side. She is sitting up slowly, rubbing her elbow, when she sees herself kissing the Doctor. The feeling is exhaustion, delirium, and lust in equal measures, tainted by her first ever bout of time sickness when she realizes the Doctor is also walking into the TARDIS with Donna.

She feels more than a little lost after that.

Her self on the beach hears the TARDIS disappearing and pulls out of the kiss, moving towards the flickering image. Neither of her can take their eyes off of it until long after the beach becomes all that can be seen. And then the Doctor in the blue suit takes her hand and Rose can feel their smiles everywhere.

She suddenly feels itchy and just wants to get away. This is not her future. This is not her world. Bad Wolf Bay, again, will not be her life. So she spends a couple of jumps on edge, causing more trouble than she should with a rather large gun and a much faster walk. It's heavy enough to make her finally feel weighted down.

Mickey tags along for a bit. But he can’t digest all the different timelines and she barely sees him anyway.

***

Finally, she sees a world in which she stays with the pin-striped Doctor and it is perfect and fragile and lovely and rushed.

And short.

She is gone too fast and he is alone and broken and reckless and her love has maybe made him just a little too human. Before her eyes she sees flashes of him drowning _again and again and again and again and again and again._

She remembers her vow to keep him from falling and though she wants to pretend she doesn’t know how, now she knows she does.

***

And then without trying at all, one day it is different. One day she shifts and it all shifts. She is in the right universe and it is the right time and the world crumbling around her is the right one. He is close and she can feel it all rushing through her, the way the timelines are all wrapping together, twisting towards an end. Either they win or they lose. She knows how both options turn out, and that is enough weight that she doesn’t need the gun anymore. 

When she eventually sees him, the right him, it's beautiful and slow motion and radiant and abrupt. And when she finally gets her hug, she is hugging him for the fate of the universe, for every time she had to stand back and watch. Rose is breathing in the scent of him knowing that somehow, _part of this is for her_.

While Donna and the Doctor are off fetching post regeneration tea from the kitchen, she realizes Jack doesn’t remember seeing her on the Valiant. He is pouting at her playfully with wounded eyes and simpering, “Hello Jack! You are alive. Lucky me! I must tell you about this ongoing dream I’ve been having involving a captain’s chair, some pipe cleaners and a tea cozy.”

She just smiles quietly and pulls him into a hug. “I did miss you Jack. and I, I’m really glad to see you, that you're alright. That you're alive.” He sobers up and they are looking at each other intently when the Doctor and Donna return.

“Rose, you’ve been in a parallel world, that world is running ahead of this universe. You’ve seen the future. What was it?” She is shocked when he asks. She never thought he would - he always hated spoilers.  Beyond that, she doesn’t know what she can tell. There's so much to say and she finds it hard to look at Donna. She cannot count the number of times she has seen this woman be extraordinary. But in her travels, Rose has heard the song of the Doctor Donna and she doesn't have to know the how to guess the end.

So she glosses things over and focuses on the darkness, explains the stars going out, the dimension cannon. She waits for the lecture about fracturing time and space as she flashes on memories of broken glass littering the Torchwood offices at Canary Wharf. Instead, he grins at her with such unabashed glee that she wraps herself in it, trying to ignore the hint of desperation that makes her realize he might be a little too far fallen as it is. She needs the lecture. She misses it. She might even deserve it.

She gets to hold his hand later, as his TARDIS slips away with Donna locked inside. She fights her panic by stroking her thumb over his, and she tries to squeezes his hand hard enough to keep him steady. She manages not to pull back when he squeezes so hard his nails leave a pattern across her skin. 

When Jack is shot, she rushes over to him, cradling his head in her hands and kissing his cheek _again._ He barely gets it out, “You were there, weren’t you.” She squeezes him twice on the arm and they both remember as his eyes flutter shut.

She realizes that Davros is the one who will inadvertently pick the Doctor back up from where he has fallen, reinventing him once again: _The Destroyer of Worlds_. So she spends the rest of her time saving the universe as the necessary bystander, a bystander but also the witness. To remind the Doctor of the Time Lord he was and the man he has become.

In that split second between when all seems lost and when the TARDIS reappears, Rose sees the Doctor harden, she gets another glimpse of his soul, and she wishes he only had a better view.

In that split second, she knows which way is up and which way is right, and she loves him so completely she has to look away.

***

When the time comes, her tears on the beach are genuine. It almost surprises her how easily they come. But she cries in the same way that she does during sad old movies, in resignation and anticipation of the ending to come.

She goes through the movements and she knows she is doing the right thing by letting him let her go. She is letting them both choose, in a way. And when she feels _his_ one heart beat under her palm she begins to believe it too. This is a man who won't be broken by loving her. This is a man who knows how to swim.

 _He_ tells her “I love you. Always have, always will,” and it is enough. She kisses _him_ , she kisses them both. It is her ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and ‘I love you’ and ‘I know’. And she tastes his ‘Forgive me’ on the tip of _his_ ‘Forever.’

As the TARDIS shimmers out of sight and he wraps his hand around hers, she feels the ground firmly underneath her feet for the first time since she was nineteen. She squeezes his hand lightly so that he knows she is _here_ , and he squeezes back twice as hard, to keep her steady. She has no tears left, only images of all she has seen fading into washes of colors.

Somewhere, a lonely god is sighing.

All this, she knows. 

***

 


End file.
